The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (38 page)

And then there was this new kid Clemente, who saved his fury for the Dodgers. Games with Los Angeles would always mean more to Clemente, for the Dodgers were his first team, and they had traded him. That was not to say that the Braves didn’t hold special value to Clemente. Henry was the all-star in right field—Clemente’s position—and the two staged a quiet but furious rivalry each year for the title of best right fielder in the National League. Only one could be the leading man, especially when it came time to start the All-Star Game.

In the opener, Juan Pizarro pitched brilliantly. Perhaps more than any other pitcher on the staff, Pizarro was weighted by expectations. All of twenty-one years old, he couldn’t go to the watercooler without hearing how he would one day be the next Spahn.

Through six innings, the score was tied at three—the big kids playing tit for tat. Clemente singled and scored in the first. Aaron drove in the Braves first run on an RBI grounder. For a moment, it appeared Pizarro would escape the ninth, after pinch hitter Roman Mejias led off the inning with a single to center and was called out for not touching first base. But after Bill Virdon flied to left, there was Clemente (three for four, three runs scored), who lofted a two-out, game-winning home run to center field.

Burdette beat the Pirates the next night, and Henry’s two-out home run in the first stood up in the third game. Spahn finished the Pirates in the finale, and the lead over Pittsburgh was eight. A week later, the Pirates went on a final tear, winning seven in a row, cutting the lead to four and a half on August 20 after thumping Milwaukee twice at Forbes Field, 6–4 and 10–zip. They would beat the Braves four more times down the stretch but couldn’t get closer than five games for that most quintessential of baseball reasons: They couldn’t beat last-place teams. The Phillies and Dodgers beat the Pirates seven times in the final thirty games of the season.

Meanwhile, an inch away from defending their pennant, it was Henry who made short work of Cincinnati Sunday afternoon, September 21, at Crosley Field.

Fifth inning, scoreless game: Henry hits a three-run double. Later, he hit a two-run homer, his thirtieth, to take away the suspense. The score was 6–0. Then in the seventh, Frank Robinson boomed a homer off Spahn, who later admitted he let up because he was “feeling cocky.” Then the lead shrank to 6–5 in that same inning. Only when McMahon got Ed Bailey to fly out to Bruton did the sweat ease. The final score was 6–5. Fourteen thousand fans awaited the team at the airport. The race was over, the pennant secured, and, once more, the Yankees were waiting.

A
ND NOW
, game four over, Spahn had beaten Ford. The Braves were a game from repeating as champions. Burdette took the ball for game five of the World Series. Outside the Milwaukee clubhouse, two cases of champagne stacked on top of each other sat on a handcart in anticipation of the fact that by the end of the afternoon, the baseball season would end as it had a year before, with Burdette beating the Yankees at Yankee Stadium.

As metaphors went, this catastrophe was no hurricane. With a hurricane, you can see it coming a hundred miles away, days before it hits, swirling in its menacing formation. You can anticipate its angry acceleration. Nor was it an earthquake, for though earthquakes strike without warning, their damage is quick and immediate. The fall of the Milwaukee Braves was more like buying the newest, nicest house on the block, the envy of all the neighbors, only to discover upon closer, belated inspection, the basement is damp with moisture, the pretty wood frame has rotted from underneath, the trusses bow, and the roof probably won’t survive the winter. Yet on the outside, everything looked fine.

October 6, 1958. Bob Turley was on the mound for the Yanks. Turley was no pushover. He was, in fact, a hard-throwing right-hander, a strikeout pitcher who had pitched well against the Braves in the previous World Series. But in game two, in the same pitching matchup at County Stadium, the Braves had clubbed Turley for seven runs in the first inning, when he retired exactly one batter. Bruton had led off the game with a home run and Burdette had poured bourbon in the open wound, ending the scoring that inning by ripping a three-run homer that not only made the score 7–1 but knocked Elston Howard—who careened into the chain-link fence in left while trying to keep the ball in the park—right out of the game.

Even before the legendary shadows could descend on the Yankee Stadium grass, Lou Perini, sitting in the box seats with his wife and Joe Cairnes, knew to send the champagne back to the icebox.

The final score was 7–0. Turley had struck out ten, fanning Henry twice. There would be no celebration, only a long flight to Milwaukee and two chances to win one game at County Stadium.

But you wouldn’t have known the Braves had blown a chance to win the World Series by the scene in the Milwaukee clubhouse. Haney was gray, Burdette embittered, but the rest of the Braves were as light as a Fourth of July barbecue.

BRAVES FROLIC IN CLUBHOUSE
¹³⁵
AFTER LOSS
BUT HANEY AND BURDETTE ARE GLOOMY

Aaron imitates Covington lapse

Fred Haney … wasn’t happy after yesterday’s loss to the Yankees….

But there was no evidence of unhappiness among the other Braves….

Wes Covington, smiling as always, said “no comment” when asked whether he had lost McDougald’s long drive in the sun in the sixth inning.

At that moment, his team-mate, Henry Aaron, who had just emerged from his shower, put on a clowning act that he intended as an imitation of Covington staggering aimlessly as the ball dropped. Covington only grinned some more.

Haney decided to start Spahn on two days’ rest, and if need be for a deciding game seven, Burdette on two days’ rest.

Overconfidence comes in many forms. With the Braves, it revealed itself in a total lack of concentration, which undermined Spahn. Bauer hit a two-out homer in the first to make it 1–0 before the Braves chased the great Whitey Ford in just an inning and a third, taking a 2–1 lead. Spahn held the lead until the sixth, when Mantle and Howard singled to lead off the inning. Berra hit a game-tying sacrifice fly that scored Mantle, who had advanced on an error by Bruton in center. It was the second error of the afternoon and it cost Spahn the lead.

Haney, of whose managerial abilities Henry would always be critical, allowed Spahn to pitch into the tenth in a 2–2 game. McDougald led off the inning with a home run. Spahn responded by retiring Bauer and Mantle. One strike away from going into the bottom of the tenth down a run, Howard and Berra singled. Then Haney got the message and brought in Don McMahon, who gave up a run-scoring single to big Moose Skowron.

And so it was 4–2 in the bottom of the tenth, the Braves facing Ryne Duren, who had breezed fastball after fastball by them. Duren had entered the game in the sixth inning, had struck out the side twice, in the sixth and ninth innings. With two out and Logan on second, Henry rifled a run-scoring single to center to make it 4–3. Then Adcock singled to put the tying run on third, and the Series-winning run on first. Stengel replaced Duren with “Bullet Bob” Turley, who threw three pitches to Frank Torre. The third was a soft liner to second that floated over McDougald’s head. Henry raced toward home and the game-tying run, only to see McDougald’s legs churning, his arms outstretched, before he leaped and snared the ball into his glove to end the game.

New York won the World Series in Milwaukee, 6–2. And it was there Henry’s doubts about Fred Haney exposed themselves.

Nearly four months earlier, the Yankees and Braves had met for an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium to support the Jimmy Fund, the Boston charity created by Perini to fund cancer research. Before the game, Stengel and Haney shared a jocular moment, with Haney relishing the license to crow, since he had beaten Stengel in the World Series. Both had spent their lives in baseball. Stengel was seven years older than Haney, and at their ages, in other occupations, both would have been retired instead of standing at the center of the sports world.

But that was where similarities ended. Stengel’s ability to butcher the English language beyond recognition made him colorful to the newsmen. But like most theater, it was an act, and the true face behind the Stengel mask was that of a shark. The kindly old clown who picked up his knowledge not from books but the streets was nothing more than a routine. Stengel did not spare feelings for victory. There was no sentimentality for the moment. Take the Yankee starter for game seven, Don Larsen, who held a 2–1 lead. Billy Bruton led off the inning with a single. Frank Torre popped up, and Henry singled to put two on and one out. And what happened next? The old man tramped up the dugout steps, grim and crotchety. He wasn’t coming out for a pep talk. He took the ball from Larsen,
in the third inning
.

The game was 2–2 in the eighth. Burdette retired Bauer and struck out Mantle. Judging a pitcher by his pitch count, especially on two days’ rest, was still four decades away, but back in 1958, common sense was still available. Burdette had pitched forty-eight hours earlier, had given up just two runs. The entire Braves bull pen would not pitch again in a game that mattered for another six months. Blame it on the times, when men were men and pitchers were not removed from games, or blame it on Fred Haney, his five-foot-four-inch frame a motionless little package as Berra doubled to right.

Haney didn’t move. Then Howard singled Berra in to break the tie. Andy Carey hit a smash to third, which Mathews kept in the infield but couldn’t make a play on to put out runners at the corners, while Henry fumed in the outfield and the bull pen waited for the skipper to lead them into action and save the season. Haney let Burdette face the next batter, Skowron, who had already driven in the go-ahead run off Burdette way back in the second that put the Yankees ahead, 2–1. Skowron, naturally, homered, a big majestic drive that sent an entire city into grieving. Four runs with two out and the manager reduced to being a spectator: The score was now 6–2.

Just as he had been on the mound in game five, when the Braves were cavalier about losing, Turley was on the mound at the end, when Schoendienst lined to Mantle, thereby giving the Yankees the World Series. “Going into the eighth,
¹³⁶
when Burdette still had his tie game, the scent of victory was still strong among Milwaukee’s burghers,” wrote Shirley Povich in the
Washington Post
. “Coming out of the eighth, after those four Yankee runs, a sickly quiet reigned in the stands, and wooden men went to bat against Turley in the last two innings.”

Over the final three games, Turley had beaten Burdette twice and saved the game in between. The Braves committed six errors over the final two games and struck out twenty-five times over the final three. Henry was brilliant, with nine hits and a .333 average, while Eddie Mathews set a World Series record with eleven strikeouts and a .160 average for the Series.

There was bitterness to spare, and the Braves knew they had cost themselves greatly. They had become the one thing they detested the most. They had become a chapter in the Yankee legend, and Henry would lament often that instead of being a team that won consecutive championships and dominated an era, they had been reduced to, in his words, “just another team that won the World Series.”

Of course, they’d become more than that. They had also become one of the rare teams that gave away a championship with a 3–1 lead in games. You had to go back thirty-three years, to 1925, when the Pirates beat Washington and Walter Johnson lost game seven, to find another team that had a 3–1 lead in games and came away with nothing but dust. There were no pantomimes in the clubhouse after this one. The 1958 season was over, and nobody was laughing.

P
ERHAPS MORE THAN
any other sport, baseball is a game of self-sufficiency, a team game that lives in the individual’s domain. Nobody can hit for you. By virtue of the strikeout, a pitcher can barely include his fielders in the flow of the game. Even defensively, where a team must work together on cutoffs and relays and backups, only one person can catch the ball. On certain days, an outfielder can play the entire game and not even have an opportunity to touch the ball. Sink or swim. If the shortstop is the best player on the field but a ball is hit to deep center, there is no defensive scheme that can be concocted to shield his team from the center fielder’s defensive weaknesses, no way to showcase the better players and hide the mediocre as in football and basketball. In basketball, the player who can’t shoot can always pass the ball to a more gifted offensive player. In baseball, you can’t give an at bat to a teammate. You catch the ball and hit it, or you fail.

Conversely, because of baseball’s individualist nature, it is also virtually impossible for a position player to dominate every moment of every game. A few basketball players can account for the majority of their team’s shot totals. In extreme cases, one player can score nearly half of his team’s points. In baseball, both halves of the batting order—the first five and the bottom four—each receive approximately the same number of at bats over a single game, regardless of a player’s abilities.